Wine at lunch doesn't improve with middle age

February 26, 2006|By Mary Schmich.

Drinking at lunch.

Just writing those words, I can hear the censor cluck: You can't say that in a family newspaper.

Drinking at lunch.

It's one of those behaviors, like smoking in the office, that within a generation has turned from custom to vice, from sociable pleasure to taboo. These days you can more readily claim to be a porn star than confess that you like a glass of cabernet at noon.

A long time ago, I used to like to drink, in moderation, at lunch. A glass of wine felt so civilized. It made the morning seem more productive than it had been, and though it guaranteed that the afternoon would be less productive than it might, the glass in your hand cooed in your ear: It doesn't really matter, does it?

But now it's rare to see anyone drink at lunch, so rare that when you see it you may think: Is that person an alcoholic? On vacation? A tourist from besotted France?

The issue came up the other day when I was at a Chicago restaurant with a lunchtime group to celebrate the birthdays of two friends. A waitress appeared with goblets. Who was having wine? Several hands waggled.

I reached for my ice water, as if holding up garlic to banish the vampire, and thought: How can they?

I didn't mean "How can they?" in a moral sense. I meant how can they drink and stay awake afterward? How can they drink, even a single glass, and work?

To quote a friend who quotes the writer George Higgins: Morality often gets the credit for middle-age fatigue.

I could sooner skate in the Olympics without falling than drink at lunch without needing a nap.

And yet the idea of drinking at lunch is still as charming as Cary Grant lighting a cigarette. By lunch drinking, I don't mean the famous and anachronistic three-martini-expense-account kind, but the glass-or-two-of-wine-with-the-meal kind.

Drinking at lunch is different from drinking in the evening. At its finest, it stops time smack dab in the middle of the rushing day, paints the world in rose and gold, and for that sliver of freedom called lunch convinces you that you are heeding the poet's cry to carpe diem.

The problem is, after a certain point in life, if you drink at lunch you won't seize the day, you'll snooze through it.

Over the years, a person's pleasure-to-pain ratio is apt to change, forcing a new calculation: Is an hour of lunch glow worth a dark afternoon?

"I still admire it as a concept," says a friend, who for similar metabolic reasons rarely indulges at lunchtime anymore. "It's a getting-away with something."

If memory serves, it wasn't just getting away with something. It was a way to get away, period, to feel you were somewhere more exciting than where you were.

You weren't in (your dull town/life/job here). You were in Paris, San Francisco, Rome, the movies, wherever you learned your rituals of romance.

And it was a way of feeling grown-up--until you were so grown up that it just made you feel old.

Sometimes when I pass a certain kind of restaurant at noon, the kind with white linen tablecloths and European flair, I feel sad for all those responsible diners drinking sparkling water from their wine goblets.

"The only day we really have liquor sales at lunch is Friday," said Trang Hoang, the manager of Coco Pazzo Cafe downtown, which is that kind of restaurant. "Some people don't go back to work so they sit and have a glass of wine or two."

And on Friday when I phoned?

"I have a pretty full restaurant," she said. "And I see two glasses of champagne. Everybody else is drinking soft drinks or water."

I hope those champagne drinkers laughed and dreamed and got to nap afterward. Because there remain moments when a toast is in order, when a hoisted glass is the fitting way to celebrate or commemorate, to mark a goodbye, a hello, or one of those birthdays that end in zero.

Glasses filled with Pepsi, no matter how you clink them, rarely make the sound of "Cheers."